Kathleen Reardon talking with an attendee at the Leadership Summit in September (Courtesy of NH Center for Nonprofits)
After becoming CEO of the NH Center for Nonprofits, Kathleen Reardon created NH Gives, an annual fundraising event that raised $3.5 million in 2024 for more than 650 nonprofits. The fundraiser is publicized widely on TV, radio, social media, and in print publications. While nonprofits do individual fundraising, it’s a lot harder to get people’s attention that way. Since 2016, NH Gives has raised more than $19 million for more than 1,100 nonprofits.
“Collaboration and engagement is built into the DNA of the nonprofit sector,” Reardon says. “We’re focused on working collaboratively to assess community needs because the issues facing New Hampshire are bigger than what one organization can address. There’s a well-known saying in the nonprofit world and that’s, ‘we’re all better working together.’”
New Hampshire is home to a large and diverse community of nonprofits working in various areas such as social services, education, healthcare, arts, entrepreneurship, and environmental conservation. There are 9,621 active tax-exempt organizations operating in NH, according to ProPublica’s research into IRS records.
Coming together to raise money is one way to collaborate, but often there is collaboration around policy, programming and education. In Keene, the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit that supports rural economic development, holds the annual Radically Rural Summit program, which brings together various sectors involved in the vitality of rural communities.
“We partner with municipalities and businesses by inviting them to participate in the summit and we work a lot with organizations that support municipalities, such as the Southwest Region Planning Commission,” says Julianna Dodson, executive director at Hannah Grimes, adding the commission is analyzing food systems and coming up with ways to connect local farmers with distributors. Hannah Grimes also partners with the Community Kitchen, a local food pantry, and the Monadnock Farm and Food Coalition, as well as the Cheshire County Conservation District. “Our mantra around addressing food insecurity is ‘more local food in more local bellies.’ We consider all of these partnerships to be examples of regional ecosystem building.”
Meeting the Needs of an Aging Community
When people see a high school, they think of teenagers, and lots of them. But Alvirne High School in Hudson also has something else: an adult day care center. The program has been a 20-year partnership between Gateways Community Services in Nashua and the town of Hudson. During the pandemic, Alvirne’s technical education center was reconstructed to serve as the program’s home. The school provides space for the program free of charge where caregivers can find respite and have their loved ones who have dementia and Alzheimer’s cared for by Gateway’s professionals. Students can take a course in caring for that population and gain first-hand experience volunteering at the center.
“The town of Hudson provides the space for free and it’s a beautiful space that’s worth about $100,000 a year,” says Sandy Pelletier, president and CEO of Gateways Community Service, a nonprofit that provides services to support over 3,000 individuals in the greater Nashua area with acquired brain injuries, autism, developmental disabilities, as well as aging adults and veterans. “The whole culture here at Gateways involves a collaboration with the people we serve. We partner with them and their families, and we’re also partners with the policymakers, the legislators and the funders. They all must understand what we do and why it provides value.”
Steven Beals, principal at Alvirne High School, says the new adult day care center space, which includes an activity room, a kitchen, private nurse stations, private bathrooms, a resting space, washer and dryer, is a vibrant learning space for students that also enhances the dignity of Gateway’s clients.
“Because I had so much admiration for Gateways this became my baby,” Beals says, adding that the new center was part of a $26 million renovation project at the school that also included an auditorium and other improvements. “We have a wonderful group of committed individuals all working for a common purpose and that’s what Gateways is. This as a win-win situation.”
Pelletier says programs like these inspire her to come back day after day. “I’ve been doing this for 40 years from when Gateways was small and then it grew and grew and grew and hopefully will continue to grow,” she says. “What motivated me and some of the original staff and still [does] today is that we know we’re making a difference in somebody’s life.”
Rallying Around Mission
Identifying and addressing community needs often starts with the passion of one individual and then blossoms into a network of like-minded people. An example of this is The KEY Collective in Exeter. The KEY Collective is focused on providing children from low-income families in the Seacoast region with access to sports and other youth activities. KEY is short for Key to Empowering Youth. “We look for others with a like mind because we don’t want any kid left behind,” says KEY Collective Founder and Executive Director Kristyn LaFleur.
The KEY Collective, which grew from 165 kids when the program started in early 2017 to 395 today, began with LaFleur’s desire to make sure children could participate in sports programs without stigma. The KEY Collective doesn’t’ provide scholarships or financial assistance, but it has 31 partners throughout the Seacoast that include town recreation departments, volunteer-run youth sport organizations, the Seacoast YMCA and businesses. The organization uses a streamlined process to determine eligibility based on factors like participation in the free and reduced lunch program or Medicaid, eliminating the need for families to undergo complex financial verification processes,
LaFleur says.
“The KEY Collective came about because a lot of people in the community believed in our mission,” LaFleur says. “We exist because we don’t want there to be social stigma for kids and our partners.”
The KEY Collective began with a pilot program in the Exeter School District in the fall of 2017, reaching out to families who qualified for free or reduced lunch to offer them the organization’s #areUin? Card, that provides K-12 students from low-income families in the Seacoast with access to free or reduced-cost activities outside of school including sports, music lessons, and art lessons.
Exeter Hospital helped get the program off the ground in early 2017 with a grant focused on preventing teen suicide in the Seacoast. Grants were awarded to organizations like the KEY Collective addressing the root causes of youth suicide, including substance misuse, depression, social isolation, abuse, bullying, and barriers associated with stigma. “Exeter Hospital gave us a $10,000 grant that first year and throughout the years they have consistently supported us,” LaFleur says.
By October 2017, The KEY Collective received a Project Play Champion Award from the Aspen Institute, which recognized the #areUin? program as one of seven emerging grassroots programs in youth sports at the Let’s Play Summit in Washington, D.C.
Making Connections
Reardon says nonprofits are excellent examples of how to build the structures and programs that communities need. “They often bring people together around causes that need to be addressed, and we’ve seen more and more nonprofit leaders understand that no one can do the work alone,” she says. “A key part of the nonprofit model is synthesizing the needs of a community to find solutions to problems.”
That is a model that works for Gateways, Pelletier says. “If I reached out to either hospital in Nashua with an operational challenge, I know I can get through to a board member or a leadership member,” she says. “We create great relationships with other organizations and businesses, and often I find that when we need them, they’re willing to help.”
This spirit of mutual aid is helping address the two big challenges of affordable housing for disabled people and workforce shortages, Pelletier says, citing a recent collaboration with NeighborWorks Southern NH to find low-income housing solutions, and a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin Green Bay starting in December that will help feed the workforce pipeline by providing online credentialing for Gateways employees. “We did research and reached out to them asking if they’d be willing to work with us. It’s a great program. But we didn’t start from Ground Zero. We’re never inventing the wheel.”
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